


i don't wanna pretend (so peace will be real to me)

by greekdemigod



Series: Roisa Fic Week Summer 2017 [1]
Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/F, Inspired by Inception (2010), Roisa Fic Week Summer 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 08:53:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11460219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greekdemigod/pseuds/greekdemigod
Summary: Rose has a new job lined up, but she can't do it without her ex-girlfriend, Luisa.[Movie plot.]





	i don't wanna pretend (so peace will be real to me)

**Author's Note:**

> This will make a lot more sense if you've watched Inception, but I tried to still make it understandable in case you haven't. But if you haven't, go watch it! It's probably my favorite movie of all time.

Rose can almost forget that Luisa broke up with her two years ago while they’re sitting on this balcony together. Below them is the city in all its glory, beautiful as it catches the last rays of sun of the day. They have never visited Rome together before—always meant to, but then _this_ or _that_ would come in between.

How fitting that their reunion happens here.

Forgetting the pain and the distance is a good thing, but forgetting that they’re on a job and this isn’t their time to finally have a talk about how things went down decidedly isn’t. It’s dangerous to lose sight of priorities here.

The Trevi fountain has captured both their attention for now, although Rose keeps Luisa in her peripheral view. She has been so starved for the sight of those luminous eyes and that killer smile that it beats the palace in front of them, the impressive sculptures of Oceanus on his chariot, the men taming the hippocampi, the water cascading down into the fountain.

All her life she has wanted to visit Rome to look at all the architecture that has survived the test of time, but now that she’s here all she wants to have eyes for is her ex-girlfriend.

“It looks exactly like how I would picture it,” Luisa finally adds to the silence that has lasted a few minutes. “Did I just see Petra walk past over there?” She pushes up from her chair to hang over the railing and peer down. “Yeah, there she is. She’s buying gelato.”

“She would,” Rose admits with a roll of her eyes. “Petra, always going for food when we have her on back-up.”

“Remember when—” Of course Rose would remember, whatever it is Luisa meant to say — she remembers every moment she has spent with her, from the unremarkable way they met at a work meeting to all the jobs the four of them have done together to the painful way their relationship ended — but they really can’t afford to do this now, so she cuts Luisa off with a gesture.

“Later.” And then, she quickly adds, “Please.”

She will be so angry if this was her only chance to visit the subject of their relationship, if the later she’s asking — _begging_ , admittedly — for won’t be granted her.

“Let’s go inside. He's waiting.”

Rose has no idea what the hotel _Fontana_ really looks like beyond the few pictures she has looked at on their website, but in all her thorough research she has found Emilio Solano has never visited it anyway. Which means she got to design the space all to her own liking, with all the things she needs to get the job done.

It’s her favorite part of what she does. It used to be the pay, which has always been exorbitant considering her exceptional skill, but what is money if it doesn’t make her happy anymore?

Her twenty years old self is scoffing at how soft and weak she has become.

The room is spacious, divided into three sections by the Corinthian columns evenly-spaced supporting the high ceiling. There is a small sitting area on one side, an open and undecorated space in the middle, and a king-sized bed on the other side.

Rafael Solano wakes up in that bed, messy hair and an even messier scruff, with a woman still asleep by his side. According to all her sources, this shouldn’t be too weird an occurrence in the young millionaire’s life.

Rose does not pull his attention to them yet. All in due time. Let him first notice the vault that’s conveniently located right across from the bed, set into the wall and normally hidden by a copy of a mural painting that can be found in Pompeii. It’s the only vibrant splash of color — all reds and yellows — in the otherwise demurely white room.

Meant to catch his eye, both the color and the fact that the painting is peeled away to _reveal_ the vault. His mind will supply the rest. Vaults aren’t supposed to be shown like that. Since vaults carry secrets. Maybe this one is carrying _his_ secrets.

That’s how the subconscious works.

But if he isn’t already filing away all the things he has hidden for years in there, Rose is about to lend him a hand.

She clears her throat and the way he stumbles off the bed in his haste to turn his head towards her is comical, _hysterical_ , but she manages not to laugh out loud. Luisa, who normally has more trouble not laughing at inappropriate moments, is understandably more stoic this time.

This is the half-brother she has never met. Who somehow inherited everything when her father died, even though Luisa had never heard of him while Emilio was still alive.

When the currently biggest competitor of the Marbella Hotel Group ordered an extraction of information from Rafael Solano’s mind, Rose was sure to jump right on it. And although Luisa quit this job two years ago, for this she would make an exception.

Rose is pretty mindful of the fact that not much else would have even gotten her foot in the door with Luisa, let alone gotten them to work together again after everything, so she is a little grateful to both that greedy Lachlan Moore and the annoying Rafael Solano for the opportunity.

She will repay that gratitude with double crossing one and robbing the other.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” He looks from Rose, who quirks an eyebrow at his unimaginative first reaction, to Luisa, who he doesn’t seem to recognize.

Right, Rose forgot she doesn’t look like herself to him. And would he even know who she is if she did? He might’ve stolen her birthright, but it would be par for the course of his entire life so far if he did it without even looking at _who_ he was hurting.

“We are hotel security. Don’t you see our uniforms?” The power of suggestion is significant, especially here. Rafael’s shoulders untense as he takes in their clothes, suddenly transformed into hideous security guard uniforms.

Rafael is the dreamer and so he fills in this reality. There is only so much Rose can do as the architect of the dream while Rafael is _aware_ until his subconscious starts to rebel against him.

There’s too much riding on this, for Luisa, that she’ll go for the smooth ride over flexing the muscles of her imagination and really toying with her prey.

“You called us about the vault. Don’t you remember? You were afraid someone might have broken into it and stolen all your secrets.”

“I… don’t remember,” Rafael mutters. He won’t remember anything from before waking up in that bed, nothing from the night before he assumes he must have had, nothing at all. But likely he won’t realize he’s dreaming, either.

Most simple minds could not even fathom the reality of extractors, so they won’t make that leap.

Rose is pretty certain Rafael has the simplest mind she has ever entered when she sees him conjure empty champagne bottles to litter the floor, to explain his own memory loss.

She steps up to the vault and presses her fingers to it. “My colleague will take down any information you can give us while I check the vault for breaches. Please follow her to the sitting area, mister Solano.”

He listens, too. It truly is like taking candy from a baby.

Some jobs at least require some finesse, some artful skirting around everything that could give them away as the thieves that they are, some intricate staging of a situation or scenery to guide the mind to the right place. But Rafael’s mind is not refined enough to require any extra information.

She tries his birthday as the passcode and is not surprised to find the vault give way to her pull and reveal folders filled with papers. All his secrets conjured just like that, written out neatly for her perusal.

After replacing it with blank pages, she tucks the folder safely away and sticks her thumb up at Luisa, who now knows she can wrap up her conversation and not spend a minute longer on a man who either didn’t care about her well-being enough to keep his hands off her inheritance or intentionally bore ill-will towards her.

Either way, Rose would not want to be in her place.

“Sir, your... uh, guest is awake.” As soon as she suggests it, of course, it happens, so the blonde in his bed props herself up on her elbow and grins sleepily. “We will send up room service.”

One gorgeous woman should be enough to keep his mind off of his secrets long enough for them to read through all the contents before his mind pulls them back into the vault.

They hurry out of the door and don’t look at each other until it is closed behind them. Just to be sure, Rose thinks about how it isn’t a real door at all, just decoration, effectively locking Rafael inside. His subconscious will itch and pull at someone else messing around in it, but Rafael will probably not become sensitive to it in time to stop them.

“If we split it between us, we’ll be faster,” Rose says as she offers about half of the papers, but Luisa shakes her head and holds out her hand for all of it.

“That’s my half-brother, not yours.”

Two years ago, they would have done this together. Before Rose chose work over Luisa every time, chose being in dreamscapes and remaining a thief over settling down somewhere and starting a legitimate life together, chose to have a truly petty fight with Luisa and trying to guilt trip her into staying on her team just a few more years.

All she can do now is respect her wishes and turn away from her, to give her the privacy to read words that will probably hurt.

It takes a while. Rose spends it chewing on the nail of her thumb and listening to the rustling of pages and Luisa’s breathing. It is torture.

No, torture is when Luisa says they’re ready to go and doesn’t tell her what she found. Maybe one day they’ll make up and Rose will be told, but not right now, apparently. So how is she supposed to _be there_ for Luisa if she doesn’t even know if she needs comforting or not, if what she learned about Rafael and her father hurt her or made her finally understand.

At least they get to jump off the building together, so that they wake up in actual reality at the same time, lying on the floor of an abandoned warehouse close to where they snatched Rafael out of her minimum-security penthouse.

Jane looks up and puts her book away, then checks her watch. “You were only out for ten minutes.”

“We didn’t even have to go a layer deeper,” Rose says pointedly, looking over at where Petra’s curled up on a futon. “Your girlfriend’s not going to wake up happy.”

“You know how she hates not getting to do anything.” Jane shakes her head. “You better let her design the level next time.”

She wants to say there might not be a next time, but that’s a conversation she wants to have with Luisa first. Besides, they need to get going fast, before Rafael wakes up, and jeopardizing Jane and Petra’s job security does not seem like that’s going to be conducive to that.

Jane wakes up Petra by pressing the button on the machine that allows them to share a dream together. Rafael’s sedative was slightly stronger, which will give them about five minutes to pack everything away and get themselves scarce.

No time is wasted talking about the job they did; instead, they’re moving around each other in a flurry of speed to get IV-lines rolled back into the portable case of the device, to roll up their mats and futons, to adjust their clothes and leave the warehouse.

“We’ll see you tonight at the restaurant.” Rose waves at her two colleagues and then takes Luisa down the other direction, carrying a bulky suitcase hiding what they just did in plain sight. “So, I was thinking,” she begins, softly, looking sideways at the woman that changed it all.

That changed _her_.

“About?”

“About what you said two years ago in Paris. You were right.”

Luisa stops them at the next crossroads and turns fully towards her. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying sorry.” Instant response. The old Rose would have been too proud and too goddamn stubborn, but a Rose who has had to go two years without the love of her life has learned she’ll swallow her pride anytime now. “And I’m asking you if we could go somewhere and talk. About us. About whether you would give me a second chance because this was the last time I did a job as an extractor.”

The way Luisa looks at her lasts a small eternity, expression puzzled and hopeful and scared and distrusting at once. When she blinks, it has all turned to the one thing that Luisa has always had in abundance because the rest of the world doesn’t: forgiveness.

“Yeah,” she whispers, smiling. “We can talk.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
